Ty I’ve spelled his name probably every wrong way in the past.

Ty! That’s really good to know!

When systemd first showed up there wasn’t much parallelized init systems. People managing complex systems with many services may find the tools of systemd make their lives easier. Of course, nowadays all that complex multi service machine stuff is containerized and none of those containers run systemd 🤔

If I were gonna psychologize it, poettering and kay typify what the Linux user of the 0s felt when they actually looked at what windows of the time had going on under the hood. “Look at you, tla username, pathetic creature of twenty text files under a trench coat!”

The problem with that sentiment is that there’s an honesty to recognizing and accepting that you’re not too far removed from the z80 and it keeps you from believing all this computer stuff is more than it’s cracked up to be.

No one who’s happy with python also keeps a loaded gun next to the server for when it acts up and that’s the problem.

🫡

That’s horrifying. I was just writing from memory and resisting pulse for a few years after it was sort of the defacto standard.

There’s both runit and system6.

If you really want the short version:

Systemd was half baked literally when it came out and figuratively as an idea, so much so that there’s already a replacement for it in the works.

A longer version:

Systemd replaced the init script style of boot and process management, which had been in place for decades. init scripts were so simple they could be understood just by looking at the name: the computer is Initialized by Scripts. Systemd was much more complex and allowed many more tools to interact with the different parts of the computer, but people had to learn these tools. Previously all a person had to understand to deal with the computer was how to edit a text file and what various commands and programs did. After systemd a person has to understand how to use the dozens of invocations of systemctl and it’s variants and if they are dealing with a problem, —you know, the only reason a person would ever be dealing with initializing services— they gotta know what’s going on with the text files that systemd uses to run different commands and programs.

So a person who already understood what was going on might rightly say “hey, this systemd thing is just the same shit with different file locations and more to learn”.

People complain about the creator and maintainer of systemd, lennart poettering . Poettering is also the person behind pulseaudio, an powerful but complex audio management daemon in Linux whose name you only recognize because it’s caused you no end of trouble. Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire.

The argument could be made (and probably has) that poetterings work is indicative of the problems with foss developers working as employees of major companies with their job responsibilities inclusive of their foss projects. The developer in that situation has an incentive to make big sweeping changes, they’re being paid for it after all, instead of being more careful and measured.

When every big foss maintainer is trying to find a way to justify being paid for it, their projects are never done.

At least poettering is working for Microsoft, ruining windows now…

E: oh my god I forgot about the binary log files! So before (and now), the universal format for log files was plain text. You know, because it’s a log that’s text. Systemd uses binary log files that need a special tool to open and parse. So if you want to look through them on a computer without that tool you’re kinda screwed. Now systemd isn’t the only software package with binary log files, but many people have made the very persuasive argument that it’s not a trait to copy.

E2: actually spelled the man’s name right. Thanks @floofloof@lemmy.ca !